


Things you said

by estherlyon



Series: Prompts in a Galaxy far far away [6]
Category: Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016)
Genre: Date Rape Drug/Roofies, F/M, Fluff, Hurt/Comfort, Mild Angst, Swearing
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-04-29
Updated: 2018-04-29
Packaged: 2019-04-29 20:32:40
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 6
Words: 5,076
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14480652
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/estherlyon/pseuds/estherlyon
Summary: Things Jyn and Cassian said to each other during the Galactic Civil War.Prompts off a list on tumblr.





	1. Things you said when you were scared

It was way, way too hot, despite night having fallen at least two standard hours before, and Jyn felt her light clothes clinging to every inch of her body. Her shoulders hurt, like carrying the rifle she had snagged out of a skirmish with ‘troopers two days before was too much for her, and she swallowed – dry, because she had run out of water already – and took a deep breath, hoping against hope that Cassian wouldn’t notice.

He did. He turned around – he was ahead while she was supposed to have their backs – but when she lifted her eyes off the ground to look at him, darkness danced at the edge of them and her ears were filled with the sound of thousands of insects, as if it were late afternoon in the jungles of Onderon and she the child soldier in Saw’s cadre.

Tatooine wasn’t a jungle planet. Far from it.

Which made her realize that she should be cold, since the planet’s twin suns were long since set. Deserts were supposed to be cold at night.

“Jyn?”

He was walking back in her direction, meaning that she had stopped at some point.  

“We have to hurry because the sand people-“ the words tumbled out her mouth and they felt filled with sand, like the ground under her feet.

What the kriff was wrong with her?

Hands, calloused hands grabbed her face, pointed a light in her face, at which she barely squinted. She tried to hold on to him, but her hands came up empty and panic surged through her, because she should have been careful. This could only mean that at some point in Jabba’s palace- she shouldn’t have been distracted by seeing Han Solo in carbonite.

“Jyn, stay with me,” he rasped, accent thick with weariness and worry.

“I’m sorry,” she mumbled, and felt her knees give away beneath her.

When she came to, she was leaning against something soft, legs splayed on the hard ground, and a sort of calm settled inside her when she felt arms holding her in place. She still marveled that having him hold her didn’t send her into a panic, didn’t make her feel trapped. Dimly, she realized that what had woken her had been his voice, because he was speaking in a low tone, a little bit rushed, like he usually did when he was nervous. Her first thought was that it was into a comm, but he was addressing  _her_.

“Heart rate is almost back to normal,” he was mumbling, “hope you stay asleep, because fighting this won’t be pretty until Kay comes to get us.”

She was about to open her mouth to answer, but he went on, “I’ve just realized that I’ve been feeling like this since we were on Jedha and you ran into the line of fire to save that little kid. Then you disappeared with Saw and everything started crumbling and there it was again. And Eadu, when I saw you on that stupid platform. When Krennic started shooting us while we were climbling the data tower. When I couldn’t find you in Hoth while kriffing Darth Vader was wandering around Echo Base. I knew it meant something on Jedha – I knew I was somehow compromised, but I thought it was just the state I was in.”

He was rambling. Cassian didn’t ramble. He barked orders and screamed her name and explained to people precisely what it was they had to do in a mission. As if reading her mind, he coughed up a laugh.

“I think I’ve loved you since Jedha, is what I am saying, and it’s kind of ridiculous, isn’t it- oh, heart rate just went up a bit more. Should I keep talking then?”

She was too stunned to let him go on with what he was saying.

“No,” she said, voice hoarse and almost inaudible.

His response was to grip her tighter still. She opened her eyes and suddenly, in the darkness of the desert, there was a little light. The same one he had shoved in her face before, she presumed. He checked her eyes and she could see, from what the lantern lit of his face, that there was a tinge of pink underneath the grime there.

“How do you feel?” he whispered.

“Parched,” she said, “a little dizzy. Do you have any water?”

He had to let her go a bit, to reach into his monster of a backpack and grab a canteen. She leaned against the sandbank behind them, sideways, and took the water from him with shaky hands. She guzzled it and while at it, raised an eyebrow at him in question.

“Go ahead and finish it. I have another. Kay will be here soon – only an hour until the suns rise.”

“Isn’t it dangerous, our lying out here like this?”

“No more than you- you know.”

Jyn nodded and the action made her feel like the meridians on Tatooine had just shifted.

“You were scared,” she said.

“I’ve always been scared. Since-“

“Jedha.”

“Yes.”

“Cassian,” she said, hands dropping the empty canteen to frame his face with whatever strength she had left in her still drugged body, “I don’t know since when exactly I’ve been ‘scared’, but it was pretty early on, too.”

He did that thing where he looked at the ground and then back up at her, something like a smile in the curve of his mouth and the corners of his eyes. She was going to kill whoever it was that had roofied her back at Jabba’s, because she wanted to jump her boyfriend’s bones but had no strength to do it. Cassian ran a hand over her forehead, tucked a strand of hair behind her ear.

“Later,” he said, voice laced with something light for once, “you’re going to be fine… So, you know, later.”


	2. Things you said on the kitchen table

He felt her warm hand slide under his shirt and run a deft finger over the thin line on his spine, the one almost no one knew was there. She brought the hand up, up, taking it with it the rough Alliance issue cloth of his shirt until she poked right below his shoulder blades.

“Posture,” she mumbled, speaking around what he could only guess was a piece of fruit.

He breathed through his nose and sat up, pushing out his ribs until his spine was straight and not the curved line it probably was – as curved as the aurabesh letters in the briefings in front of him, he supposed. Jyn’s hand was still on him and she pulled it from under his shirt to rub the space between his shoulders and the back of his neck, like he was one of the tookah cats she swore she didn’t feed back on base. Cassian just knew, instinctively, to lean backwards and the back of his head hit the firm line of her hips where she stood behind him in the galley, trapping her hand between him and her own leg. He tilted his chin up and met her eyes.

“If it’s not hurting you now, it will hurt when you go to sleep,” she said in the low voice she used for these nurturing moments.

It still sounded a bit weird, hearing her talk like this, in a way he knew she wasn’t used to. It was rather like watching a baby nerf grow sturdy in its legs.

He remembered he needed to practice as well.

“You did a lot of heavy lifting today. Did you ice your knee?”

He reached backwards and touched the joint in question, rubbed at the indents there. His lower lip tucked itself under his teeth as he slid his fingers up right where he knew it tickled her. She dug her blunt nails into the flesh of his neck in response. He kept his eyes on hers, no matter how much of a strain it was.

“I think you should come and inspect it – see if it’s not swollen,” her teeth were gritted and he felt his groin twitch at the low rumble that came through them.

The speed with which he stood up sent her jumping backwards, laughter coloring her eyes. Something like anticipation settled in his bones.

“The others?” he asked, hands where hers had been previously, stretching the place his spine was held together by implants with contrived nonchalance.

“Still in town,” she was peering at him from under her lashes now, “Bodhi wants fresh bread and Baze is on a mission.”

“For?”

“Tea.”

He settled against the table and gingerly wiped the datapads and flimsies he had been studying aside. She walked into his space, shoving him lightly on top of the admittedly large galley table; this ship was meant for a large crew, after all.

“How hard it is to find decent tea on Mantooine?”

“Hard,” she replied, nose almost touching his pulse point.

He put a hand on her back, mimicking her actions earlier, even though unlike him she was whole and sturdy there, a coil ready to spring into action at any moment.

“And good tea?”

Her breath hitched when he ran his nails right into the tender skin in the middle of her back, “very hard.”

She bit his neck and he let her skim her lips towards his mouth, his grip on her only strengthening.

“That means it will be a while, then,” he said hoarsely when she pulled back from the kiss; he had to hand it to himself that he was able carry on the conversation in his state.

Jyn only hummed against him, large teeth biting into his lower lip.

He had his hand on her ass and she had undone his pants without him even noticing, turning wide eyes on him as if it was answer enough. Thief.

“Come here,” he breathed and the little growl she let out in response was almost all the satisfaction he needed.

Almost.


	3. Things you said with too many miles between us

_Well, that was fun_

The words made relief run down his back and he briefly closed his eyes. He had the comlink on a chain around his neck – an encrypted line both came up with in an afternoon on Yavin IV when he had just been released by medical and knew that missions would soon split them apart. His fingers flew on the tiny keyboard.

**Only you would say that**

_Says the man who once outran the world ending by calculating the coordinates himself as if it were a bar tab_

If Jyn was making jokes, she was nervous, he realized, but he knew that if he pointed it out, she would probably be mad or worried that she was worrying him in turn. Cassian absently shook his head.

**A man does what he can to impress a girl**

He bit his lower lip and could only hope that Draven was still busy stomping around not to notice that his second in command was in a corner making lame jokes to his girlfriend.

_How’s he doing?_

**I gave up taking him to medical**

_Have_ you  **** _been to medical?_

**I’m fine**

_I’m going to pretend I believe that_

**Someone gave me a hot water bottle and pain meds**

_Good. Thank them for me_

**You?**

_Just a few bruises._

**I’m going to pretend I believe that**  

They kept it short, because they were good with encrypting, but he could feel, even as he typed, a deep paranoia curling around his heart. In the faces of the people around them, in the blues and greys of the ship’s bridge, there was grief and worry. After the general shouting had subsided once they had made the jump to hyperspace, a tangible gloom had fallen over that part of the ship. He supposed that towards the main hold and even the cargo bays – where he had seen people huddling and stepping over each other while he was boarding – the situation was the same.

He left Draven behind after he made sure he wasn’t needed, carrying with him the medkit someone had shoved in his hands once he had made it to the bridge. It had, in fact, a hot water bottle and pain meds; the Twi’lek nurse that had made it onto their transport knew him that well apparently. Out in the main corridor, there was a young woman with a shock of orange hair and a datapad in her hand who looked like she might know where he was supposed to go and he approached her, noticing the tension in her shoulders and her red-rimmed eyes.

“Major Andor,” her smile was watery, “General Draven asked me to make sure you got one of the individual bunks.”

He gritted his teeth, a bit embarrassed, but he was aware that Draven knew his medical files by heart and that, therefore, would arrange it that his nightmares and occasional panic attacks didn’t add to anyone’s trauma.

After all, the only person who was capable of dealing with them wasn’t on that transport. She had been in an assault unit taking down ‘troopers with her baton amidst the ice when he had all but dragged Draven from the crumbling corridors leading to Echo Base’s command center.

He got the passcodes from the orange-haired officer, thanked her by shedding a little bit of the reserve he carried around on base, and when he closed the bunk’s door behind him, he fell to the durasteel floor in a clump. His heart felt like it was in the back of his mouth.

_I love you_

Sometimes he could swear Jyn was Force sensitive.

**I love you, too.**

 

 


	4. Things you said under the stars and in the grass

They came to a screeching halt once they were sure there were no more clomping boots, no more blaster fire, nothing that made the hairs on the back of their necks stand on end. Jyn felt something of a headrush as Cassian spoke into the sleeve of his jacket.

“Bodhi, we’re in need of a ride.”

 _“I’m coming_ ,” replied their friend and that was it.

Silence.

Or at least, as much silence as could be had when you were at what appeared to be the edge of a cliff, with the ocean crashing underneath. The grass beneath them was thin and as Jyn looked around, she realized they were still too exposed. Her heart started galloping again in her chest. If the Imps came out after them with fighters, they would be found out in seconds. Cassian seemed to be of the same mind. He walked over to the edge of the cliff.

“Come on.”

She drew her night vision goggles and saw that what they were standing on wasn’t really a cliff, she now realized. More like the promontory of a hill and there was a clear path that led the way to a terrain of dunes covered in what seemed – at night – some purple vegetation that was slightly thicker than what they were standing on. She clambered down after Cassian and soon enough, she felt more secure.

“We’re down by the beach,” Cassian said into the comlink once again.

Bodhi only gave two taps in response.

Jyn’s lungs filled with sea air and she had always felt she would feel uneasy when she felt it again after Scarif, but Scarif smelled of sun and ozone-scorched sand, palm trees dancing in the wind. Only as she felt the tremble of the Death Star aiming for them had she realized that she was going to die by the sea and that she had always loved it, because of Lah’mu. And yet, it was nothing like Lah’mu, on Scarif. Lah’mu’s sea air was mossy and heavier. The sea filled the air and it in turn came to rest on your hair and your skin and your clothes. And here she was, feeling it all again.

She settled down on the purple grass, letting the moon guide her way into her backpack. The data disks they had come for  were there, as were the credit chips, the ones she would tell Cassian she had stolen after they were in hyperspace. She felt him move beside her, sit down himself with his blaster close at hand and his scope even closer. She looked ahead, at the wide expanse of purple and the ocean down below, crashing black against the clear strip of sand. She turned to Cassian and saw that he was rather looking up at the stars. There were huge clusters of them. What she had thought was the planet’s moon lighting her way into the darkness had actually been those stars. They lit Cassian’s profile before her now, his cheekbone and jawline as sharp as if they could cut glass.

“What?” he asked, when he caught her staring.

“Does this remind you of somewhere?” she asked, cursing the slight tremble in her voice.

He tilted his head sideways, considering. “Not in particular. You?”

“Yes,” she whispered, arms curling across her own chest.

It felt natural that she should give him small bits of herself, but it still made her feel somewhat raw, even if it had been months since he had pulled her into his arms on Home One and with one look laid his heart bare for her to see.

“Where?”

“Lah’mu,” she sighed along with the sea breeze and almost felt her hands encroached with the mud in her parents’ farm.

“Your parents?” he asked, soft, huddling closer.

“Yes,” she almost swallowed down the word.

He put his arm around her, mumbled something about Bodhi taking way too long for his taste. She felt more at ease like this, her cheek on his parka, the sea in her lungs.

“Would you ever want to go back?” he asked and she knew from the tone of his voice that this was something he asked himself, too.

“I think so. After.”

It seemed ridiculous to think of an after, but at the same time, with him solid and smelling like moss along with her, it didn’t.

He opened his mouth to answer, but they were blinded by their ship’s lights.

They stood up and ran.


	5. Things you said over the phone

Jyn had had comlinks when she was with Saw, but her conversations over them were mostly about which Imperial tanks rolling through town were hers to sabotage. When he ditched her on Tamsye Prime, it was just with a knife and a blaster, and she knew that not having a way to communicate was part of his plan as she realized that it had been a plan. So after that, most of her comlinks were of professional use, mostly given her by her bosses and taken away after she was done working for them. Through her time with Cassian after Wobani, she hadn’t even touched one. He did all the talking that was needed.

That changed drastically when she was done putting her name on the Alliance roster aboard Home One, after Yavin IV was evacuated. She had been allowed to limp over to a quartermaster while still in her medbay gown and was given a duffle full of essentials.

A comlink was one such thing.

She had scoffed at it, until Bodhi had used it to call her down to the mess hall to eat with them. She realized, faintly, that now that she had people in her life – albeit people who were a little bit banged up and whom the war could take away at any second – a comlink wasn’t entirely useless.

Bodhi was a huge fan of that mode of communication. He took to leaving the thing beside his head as he worked on the ships in the hangar while he wasn’t cleared for flying and just babbled away: base gossip, ship design, his family back on Jedha and even her father, occasionally. It was his method of coping and Jyn understood that, usually humming along to his chatter and offering the occasional comment while she did something else, somewhere else on base.

Chirrut used his to call her to meditate with him. Baze mostly used Chirrut’s to invite her to go over blasters and grenades.

And then there was Cassian.

One thing she had in common with Cassian was that neither of them were particularly chatty people. He seemed to adhere to the comlink in the same manner she had previous to meeting him.

It all changed one night. She was in their quarters on Hoth while he was off somewhere on base, deep at work with Draven – something about Bothans, from what she had gathered though probably wasn’t allowed to – and she realized that the weight in her chest was because it was one year. One year since they had stood on that beach and waited for death, only to outrun it, though not without it leaving its scent on their clothes and its taste in the backs of their teeth. So she picked up the comlink as she lay in their bunk, pictured him holed up in an intelligence booth, back stiff and eyes tired, and tried not to feel so guilty about interrupting him.

“Jyn. What is it?”

He sounded alarmed and rightfully so. She snorted in laughter, realizing that in the past she had mostly called him when she was being shot at in the few missions they had been sent together since being cleared.

“Nothing. Just. You know.”

“No, I don’t.”

She threw herself further back into their thin pillows with a frustrated huff, “just wanted to hear your voice.”

She cringed. What the kriff?

“Alright…” he seemed at a loss and she didn’t blame him.

“It’s today.”

She could hear him shuffling things around, probably to find a datapad he could check a calendar on.

“Oh.” 

“Yes.”

“I thought you were-“

“What?”

“Doing what I’ve seen other couples do on base.”

“What do they do?”

“Talk on their comlinks for no reason. It pisses high command off because it clogs the comm lines but I guess they’d rather have morale up.”

“Huh.”

“So it wasn’t this. It was - well. You know.”

“No. And well, yes.”

“I should be back in a standard hour – I can’t make heads or tails of what I’m reading, so I have to get some sleep if I want to actually succeed in decrypting this.”

“Oh. Okay.”

“We can keep talking.”

She was silent for a beat. There was nothing to talk about.

“All right…”

“Or we could stay quiet.”

Jyn stretched out in their bunk, placed the comlink next to her head like she had seen Bodhi doing when lying under the belly of a ship. The tightness in her chest undid itself a bit, her legs – sore from training recruits all afternoon – fidgeted a bit as the muscles relaxed.

“Quiet is fine.”

“Good.”

“Good.”


	6. Things you said that made me feel like shit

Cassian Andor invariably woke up with a scream caught in his throat and his body wracked with tension, and he was used to it. It had been like this before Scarif, it remained so afterwards, for the exception of when he had been in the medbay, drugged out of his mind with painkillers immediately after their return. The main difference between now and then was that he was currently getting used to a hand on his forehead and a voice in his ear when he woke up after it happened.

It should have been a comfort.

It wasn’t.

His nightmares had mostly changed: they had a different cast of characters now. Their main protagonists alongside him weren’t the people he had killed, like in the past. In their current iteration, his nightmares now displayed those he hadn’t killed. Or ditched. His unconscious’ favorite was the owner of the hand on his forehead and the voice in his ear when he woke up; the one into whose warmth he burrowed after coming to, drenched in cold sweat, no matter where they were. 

She had nightmares of her own and he tried to alleviate them as well, letting his be the hand and the voice for once, instead of using the latter to pry information out of others and the former to dispatch them when they became a liability.

Sometimes, being of comfort made him feel even worse and that had a reason.

It was because sometimes, he woke up with very specific words ringing in his ears and squeezing his heart.

“You might as well be a stormtrooper.”

It took him a while to admit it even to himself: a fight between them had been brewing since she stepped onto his U-Wing, so it was no surprise it had happened. It especially wasn’t a surprise that it did after she had realized what had been asked of him – no, not asked, ordered. And even though he hadn’t pulled the trigger, the fact that he even had her father’s head in the crosshairs was something that at best gnawed at him, at worst made him think of those whose people he didn’t really give a second thought to killing. For his brain, it seemed, it was one thing to think of Tivik’s sister in the detached way he had spoken of her to Jyn back on Jedha; in contrast, there was no detaching himself of Galen Erso’s fate. Even if in the end, he hadn't been the one to kill the scientist.

Even If her attitude when he first inquired her about Erso would lead someone to think otherwise, he couldn’t say that Jyn seemed unaffected by her father’s death. It had the opposite effect, in fact. Alderaan’s destruction seemed to reopen the barely closing wound and it had made her put her walls up in a way that not even Bodhi’s disconcerting sincerity seemed to break through. The Death Star’s destruction had made her shed them a bit and somehow, whatever resistance that had barred her from her feelings for him.

And consequently his for her.

Yes, he had tried to resist those feelings as well, for her sake rather than his own. But when they had first spoken of their feelings - as obliquely as possible, whom were they kidding? - he had made it clear that he was a mess of a human being. She seemed to think of herself as no better.

Ever since then, though, he seemed to be on a personal quest to make himself feel like a bigger idiot:

He kept dreaming that he killed her father; that he ditched Chirrut and Baze in the destruction of their city; that he killed Bodhi after getting a hold of Galen Erso’s message; that he abandoned Jyn in Saw’s crumbling caves. Kept dreaming that Jyn died: back on Jedha, back on Eadu, on the top of Scarif’s tower. All in the name of his cause.

And he went on without saying anything about it to her, which only made matters worse.

When the anniversary of their meeting and all that unfurled afterwards approached, he at first didn’t realize it, because Draven had parked a cartful of reports on his desk in the command center. He was busy the entire day and Jyn had already been out of bed when he had awoken. He had settled to work himself into the ground and couldn’t really understand why it was that when his comlink beeped, he felt his heart climb all the way to his throat. When he checked what day it was on a calendar, a reminder of the smell of ion blasts and destruction burned all the way down to his stomach. He kept cool, was honest that he had for one delirious moment thought that Jyn wanted to chat like he had seen their peers doing. But he still didn’t tell her what was eating him inside.

Until he found her asleep in their bunk, clutching her comlink like a child would a stuffed toy. He owed her the truth, just like he had back on Eadu, he decided. Force help him.

She woke up, as he thought she might, and she sleepily cracked him such a sad smile that he felt half of his resolve crumble. So he closed his eyes, breathed once, twice, three times through his nose. He sat down on the edge of the bunk, put a hand on her shoulder.

“I keep dreaming about it,” he whispered, “about it all.”

She frowned, “so do I-“

“Let me finish,” he said and steadied his breathing again – this was something his training hadn’t prepared him for, “I keep dreaming I kill your father. Or Bodhi. Or leave Baze and Chirrut behind. Either that or you die. And I let it happen.”

Her eyes were the color of cobalt in the semi-darkness of their quarters, her mouth hung open, her nostrils flared. She swallowed but was silent for such a long time he wished back the ire she had demonstrated on Eadu. He wanted her to get on his face, to scream at him, to call him everything he deserved to be called.

“You are such an idiot,” she said slowly. Ah, there it was.

He hung his head, waiting, knowing that just like in that alleyway with the ‘troopers on Jedha, she wouldn’t stop until she was done with him.

“You think I don’t know, Cassian?” it felt like a slap in the face, “you think I don’t dream sick, stupid shit everyday about when we met? It was so easy to trust you, I think I still can’t deal with it. I feel… Just, you know, like I'm scraped to the bone. And as for guilt, how do you think my father’s machine makes me feel?”

He put out a hand, because he wasn’t actually that big of an asshole, “I just- I had to tell you. I can’t wake up with you beside me and feel like I- like I do when you’re there without having you know, or rather, without me telling you. I can’t hide things from you.”

“So don’t,” she said simply, “Just know- I don’t care what that brain of yours comes up with when you’re asleep. You didn’t kill my father. You came back for me, you took Chirrut and Baze with you. You protected Bodhi. I don’t fucking care.”

She scooted back into the bunk to make room for him, dragging him down by his arm – he hadn’t even realized she had grasped it – and he followed. He decided to do what all of them had been doing since their shuttle had touched ground on Yavin IV after that rainy, terrible night. He followed Jyn.

For the first time in a year’s worth of nights, he didn’t dream.


End file.
